Against the Grain is your key to the latest news about libraries, publishers, book jobbers, and subscription agents. Our goal is to link publishers, vendors, and librarians by reporting on the issues, literature, and people that impact the world of books and journals.

Welcome to episode 32 of ATG: The Podcast. Against
the Grain is your key to the latest news about libraries,
publishers, book jobbers, and subscription agents. Our goal is to
link publishers, vendors, and librarians by reporting on the
issues, literature, and people that impact the world of books and
journals.

This week, Leah Hinds hosts another
installment in our series of Charleston Conference preconference
previews! You can find registration for these sessions on the main
conference registration page, and session details are available on
the conference website.

First, we’re happy to welcome Lettie Conrad and Lisa
Janicke Hinchliffe. They’re presenting a preconference titled
“Prospecting User Perspectives and Practices for Past
Trends and Future Predictions.” It will be held on
Tuesday, November 7, from 1:00 – 4:00 pm. Starts at the 13
minute, 20 second mark in the recording.

Lettie Conrad brings 15+ years
publishing experience to her work with a variety of global
information organizations and partners, dedicated to advancing
knowledge and driving product innovations that ensure positive and
effective researcher experiences. She offers rigorous R&D skill
and experience designing digital products to address academic user
information practices. Lettie’s services span from strategic
planning to delivery, with a proven record of success with
evidence-based product management, user-focused product
development, and specialized expertise with metadata standards and
architecture, SEO and discoverability, performance analysis, UX and
journey mapping, and more!

Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe is
Professor/Coordinator for Information Literacy Services and
Instruction in the University Library at the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign as well as an affiliate faculty member in the
university’s School of Information Sciences. Lisa is a
past-president of the Association of College and Research
Libraries, which launched the Value of Academic Libraries
Initiative during her presidency. Lisa has presented and published
widely on information literacy, teaching and learning, the value of
academic libraries and library assessment, evaluation, and
innovation. Lisa earned her Master of Education in educational
psychology/instructional design and Master of Library and
Information Science degrees from the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign and is currently a PhD student in Global Studies
in Education in the Department of Educational Policy, Organization,
and Leadership. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in
philosophy from the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

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“Fund your Dream: Business Strategy to
Support your Innovative Initiative” is a preconference
that is scheduled for Tuesday, November 7, from 1:00 – 4:00 pm.
We’re happy to welcome the presenters and organizers Nancy Maron,
Kimberly Schmelzinger, and Brian Keith to talk with us about the
background and details about the session. Starts at the 20
minute 14 second mark in the recording.

Nancy Maron is President of BlueSky
to BluePrint. Nancy works with publishers, librarians and other
innovative project leaders to define, test and refine assumptions
about new and existing products and services. She honed her skills
in over 20 years of experience working at the nexus of publishing,
higher education and technology, most recently with the
not-for-profit organization Ithaka S+R, where she led the team
focused on Sustainability and Scholarly Communications.

Kimberly Schmelzinger is the founder
of MeanLine Publisher Services. She is a consultant providing
customized research solutions to scholarly publishers. Among other
projects, she conducts research for the AAUP (for whom she prepares
the AAUP Annual Statistics), and has recently completed two
projects funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, both related to
estimating the cost of publishing a humanities monograph.

Brian Keith is the Associate Dean
for Administrative Services & Faculty Affairs at George A.
Smathers Libraries, University of Florida. Brian is the senior
administrator for the areas of Human Resources, Staff Development,
Grants Management, Facilities and Security, and Finance and
Accounting for the Smathers Libraries. This system includes 405
employees and annual funding in excess of 34 million dollars. Brian
has a distinguished record of service to the profession and has
noteworthy accomplishments in research and scholarship.

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In this week's "If Rumors Were
Horses" segment by Katina Strauch:

The Coalition for Networked
Information (CNI), the Association of Research Libraries, and
EDUCAUSE are pleased to announce
that Herbert Van de Sompel, research
scientist at the Research Library of the Los
Alamos National Laboratory, has been named the 2017
recipient of the Paul Evan Peters Award. Named for CNI’s
founding director, the award will be presented during the CNI
membership meeting in Washington, DC, to be held December
11–12, 2017, where Van de Sompel will deliver
the Paul Evan Peters Memorial Lecture. The talk will be
recorded and made available on CNI’s
youTube and Vimeo channels after the meeting
concludes. The award recognizes notable, lasting achievements in
the creation and innovative use of network-based information
resources and services that advance scholarship and intellectual
productivity. Nominated by over a dozen highly respected members of
the information science community, Van de Sompel is
widely recognized as having created robust, scalable
infrastructures that have had a profound and lasting impact on
scholarly communication. Adept at applying theory to practice,
nominating colleagues noted that the application of some of his
groundbreaking work has become an integral part of the core
technology infrastructure for thousands of libraries worldwide,
helping to connect information across the Internet, and constantly
working to further his dream of “a scholarly communication system
that fully embraces the Web.”

An accomplished researcher and
information scientist, Van de Sompel is perhaps best
known for his role in the development of protocols designed to
expose data and make them accessible to other systems, forging
links that connect related information, thereby enhancing,
facilitating, and deepening the research process. These initiatives
include the OpenURL framework (stemming from his earlier work on
the SFX link resolver), as well as the Open Archives Initiative
(OAI), which included the Protocol for Metadata Harvesting
(OAI-PMH) and the Object Reuse and Exchange
(OAI-ORE) scheme. Van de Sompel was hired by his
alma mater, Ghent University (Belgium), in 1981 to begin
library automation. Over time, the focus shifted to providing
access to a wide variety of scholarly information sources
leveraging the technologies of the day to reach the largest
possible end-user base, and by the late 1990s, the work of his team
was considered among the best in Europe. In 2000 he received
a PhD from Ghent University, working on context-sensitive
linking, which led to the OpenURL standard and library linking
servers. Following stints at Cornell University and at
the British Library, in 2002 he joined the Los Alamos
National Laboratory as an information scientist, where he
now leads the Prototyping Team at the Research Library.

Widely sought after for advisory
boards and panels, Van de Sompel served as a member
of the European Union High Level Expert Group on Scientific Data,
as well as the Core Experts Group for the Europeana Thematic
Network, charged with building a digital repository of European
cultural assets.

I was sad to learn from Buzzy
Basch and Mark Kendall that John R.
Secor, formerly of Saugus, MA, Contoocook, NH and
Westford, MA, passed away in Exeter, NH on July 24th after a long
and brave battle with Parkinson’s Disease and Alzheimer’s Disease.
John was born in Everett, MA on April 22, 1939 and graduated
from Saugus High School in 1957. He was predeceased by his loving
wife, Sally. He is survived by children Glen and Rosheen
Secor of Westford, MA, Heidi Coen of Concord,
NH, and Traci and Martin Britten of South China, ME, as
well as nine grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. He also
leaves his sister Cathy Neri and her
husband Phil of Dover, NH, and his brother Richard
Secor and his wife Melissa of Punta Gorda, FL.
From Mark: John was a dynamic personality and
a successful entrepreneur. In 1971, he acted upon his great love of
books and libraries, forming Yankee Book Peddler, Inc., in
Contoocook, NH. From its beginnings in the basement of his home, he
grew YBP into a leading national and international
bookselling company. Those of us who had the privilege to know and
work with John and witness his unwavering commitment, dating back
to 1971, to building a world class organization for its employees,
our community and customers (who he often simply referred to as
“partners”) know well that his legacy continues to live on in
our business. John’s willingness and desire to serve as a
mentor and friend as well as building a lasting and meaningful
organization that supports learning and education is one that I,
and so many of us, will be forever grateful for. Let’s join
together in honoring John and his memory by continuing the special
work that he so successfully began nearly 50 years ago. He
will be missed by the library and publishing communities and by his
friends and colleagues at YBP. He will also be missed by the
wonderful staff of Riverwoods in
Exeter. John was exceptionally loving and generous to his
children and grandchildren, who will forever cherish him as
their Binty. He was also a dog and cat lover and was rarely
without his canine and feline companions. Katina remembers meeting
John at the very first ALA that I attended in New York City in June
1980. I had just started my job as an acquisitions librarian at the
College of Charleston Library. John was a dynamic and passionate
visionary speaker and he keynoted many early Charleston
Conferences. Wonderful memories
and YBP (GOBI) lives on!

Have you heard
of William (Bill) Ferris? I opened
my copy of the Carolina Alumni Review, (July/August 2017) and
was riveted by a fascinating article by Barry Yeoman,
“Timelessness on His Hands.” It’s about how Bill Ferris,
methodically built a priceless archive of Southern folklore. It
began in 1968 when Ferris, a long-haired 26-year-old
Mississippian who was working on a doctorate from
the University of Pennsylvania, drove his white Chevy
Nova up to a sharecropper’s shack to hear and record James
“Black Boy” Hughes play blues guitar. That could have been
all, but Ferris and Hughes became friends
and Ferris made pictures and reel-to-reel tapes of
Southern Black artists and communities. Half a century later, the
tapes and pictures would become a 173,000-item archive
with Bill Ferris’name in the UNC Southern Folklife Collection.
Ferris was always fascinated with “vernacular culture” and he
began to take pictures when he was given a ground-breaking for the
time Kodak Brownie camera on his twelfth birthday. It was the 1960s
and Ferris was a civil rights activist. When he was an
undergraduate at Davidson, he helped organize protest marches.
Various friends and academic advisors
encouraged Ferris to pursue folklore and over the years
he talked with Southern writers like Eudora
Welty and Alice Walker. Ferris invited
B.B. King to play for his Yale class. In 1996 an aide
to President Bill Clinton called Ferris to see
if he was interested in chairing the National Endowment for
the Humanities. Federal arts and humanities funding were under
siege in the 90s but Ferris’ expansive view of culture served
him well for the 4 years he was in Washington. To
quote Ferris: “Our politics, a century from now, will be
forgotten. But the great contributions of our artists and writers
and filmmakers as the beacons of who we are and who we were.”
Ferris is now at UNC’s Center for the Study of the American
South(CSAS) and is focusing on new teaching technologies,
working to produce online courses on Southern stories, art, and
music. Ferris has worked with the Morehead Planetarium on
a production of the American South with Morgan Freeman. He has
also written three books published by the University of
North Carolina Press. This is quite an article and I have barely
skimmed the surface. Read it! I promise you will enjoy
it!

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About the Podcast

The audio supplement to "Against The Grain - Linking Publishers, Vendors and Librarians"
Against the Grain is your key to the latest news about libraries, publishers, book jobbers, and subscription agents. Our goal is to link publishers, vendors, and librarians by reporting on the issues, literature, and people that impact the world of books and journals.